Breaking News For Fools: Investigation Finds That Perrier Water Is A Rip Off

THE Dispatches team over at Channel 4 has uncovered shocking evidence of the way that Perrier is woefully overpriced, actually being more expensive than honest to goodness beer and cider. Clearly the Frenchies are simply ripping us all off:

Tesco sold multipacks of Fosters, Carlsberg and Carling lager at 69p a pint and Strongbow cider for 65p a pint. This compared with Perrier mineral water costing 73p a pint.

In Asda, the same beers could be bought for 72p a pint, compared with 76p a pint for Perrier.

And at Sainsbury’s, 20 cans of Fosters lager was 72p a pint while 15 cans of Strongbow cost £8, equating to 69p a pint, 7p less than a pint of sparkling water.

Alternatively of course the Dispatches team are simply being dipsticks. Perrier is a luxury good: a Veblen Good even. It is in fact just water with bubbles put into it: it’s not naturally bubbly at all. And they deliberately make it and advertise it as being expensive. The point being that no one actually likes the stuff it’s just there to be expensive. So that when you buy it people can see that you’re the sort of person who buys expensive bottled water. That’s how it differentiates itself from the supermarket bottled water which is 19p for two litres in the same aisle.

So to compare the price of this luxury good, one that people only buy because it is expensive, with the cheap beers made for the masses is simply ridiculous.

But, if that’s what they want to do then fair enough, that’s what they want to do. But the obvious reaction to the finding is not that beer and cider are too cheap: rather that Perrier is grossly over-priced.